


春雨 (Spring Rain)

by mercredigirl



Category: Firefly
Genre: Asian Character, Character of Colour, Chinese Character, Chromatic Character, Disability, Gen, Racebending Revenge Challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-04
Updated: 2011-06-04
Packaged: 2017-10-10 09:23:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/98108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mercredigirl/pseuds/mercredigirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>They depart, far away from the spaceship where the 汉字 are painted all backwards and wrong.</i></p><p>The story of Dr Tan Jiaming and his sister Hena, and how they left <i>Serenity</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story is an extra, because I had ideas left over. Inspiration and proofreading thanks must go to [azuire](http://azuire.dreamwidth.org), the best friend anyone could ask for.
> 
> ETA DEC. 2010:
> 
> I realise that I didn’t warn before; I shall now.
> 
> **One incidence of ableist language appears in this story, as does an oblique reference to the torture River Tam experienced.**

They are discussing, in feverish tones, whether to accept the captain's offer and remain with _Serenity_, or whether to keep running alone, just the two of them, brother and sister, the last of their house and lost to their ancestral gods.

“我不信任。” Tan Hena says insistently. ‘We cannot trust him.’

‘He was a Browncoat,’ Simon reminds her. ‘He will not betray us to the Alliance.’

“他可能不会出卖我。” she replies, eyes flashing, 'but I do not wish to sell my dignity by living on his ship.'

‘Dignity!’ Simon explodes at this. ‘What _dignity_ is there? I know what you mean, River; and I don’t want to be like 爸 and 妈, 我也不想盲目崇洋， but this is not about selling dignity like our parents, 小妹。 This is about _surviving_, and I’ll eat my dignity if I can survive.’

‘I won’t.’ She turns her head away, so he will not see the tears brimming. Deep breaths, so that she will not lash out and rip the cables and pipes from the walls with her furious mind. ‘We both had the best education money could buy, and we sold our pride for that.’

_Which is true_, he concedes, remembering med school. On paper, the Alliance was an equal partnership between the United States and the People’s Republic, but economic power did not change how white society worked.

‘But, 妹妹， just listen—’ he coaxes.

‘_No!_’ The word flies from her lips. ‘I listen to you enough. Just because I am not – not _normal_ – just because I cannot always pass for normal – that does not give _you_ the right to make all my decisions. I was pinned down in that lab, 哥。 They _touched_ me and they didn’t care what I thought and they made my decisions for me and _you're doing the same right now!_’

It has always been a fine balance between pride and survival. Simon has never told her of how frenzied 爸 and 妈 became when she fell off the grid – how they panicked, how 爸 wept and 妈 screamed and both of them knew but would not say, _Nobody cares if one more pretty young Chinese girl goes missing._ He might have been disgusted, all his life, at how they fawned over their white colleagues; he might have been disgusted at how he did the same, stifling himself and nodding agreeably with his classmates; but he pitied and understood them then.

He wants to say, ‘River, be realistic.’ And at the same time, he wants to hold his sister and cry into her long dark hair and promise her (or promise himself) that it'll be alright and tomorrow will be a bright morning, 风和日丽， the earth and air filled to bursting with hope.

‘Okay,’ he says. ‘那就好吧。 We will find another way, another place to go. The galaxy is big.’ Too big, much too big, for lost friends and parted relatives to watch the same round moon. Maybe too big for all under heaven, as well. Maybe it would have been good to stay on Earth-that-was, and remain in the Middle Kingdom forever.

River throws herself at him, wrapping her arms about him impulsively. ‘Oh, God,’ she whispers, “谢谢你。谢谢你。 Thank you so much, 家明大哥。”

It feels like a slap, when she calls him by his old name, but he takes the blow gracefully. She is running from her captors, from oppression and imprisonment and objectification and rape; and he? He's running from complicity and his past.

Jiaming, _light of the house_. He has not brought much light or glory. He does not even know the dialect for 家明， even though 谭 is a name that comes out of an ancient state in 山东， which journeyed into 湖南， and which has persisted long in his family's old home of 香港。

Well, he can make a start now. Take River – take _Hena-mei_ – and run. Make a clean break. _Here I draw the line._

There is a rap at the cabin door.

“进来吧!” Simon calls, setting River down on the ground gently so she does not startle.

It’s the captain. ‘Wheels up in five,’ he says, with his broad southern smile and slow southern drawl. ‘Y’all stayin’ for dinner?’

Simon returns the smile. ‘No, thank you,’ he says politely. ‘We’ll probably be making our own way.’

‘Fine by me,’ Mal Reynolds replies, and stretches out his hand. ‘Nice meetin’ you, Doctor Simon Tam.’

Simon takes the proffered hand, shakes it, and bows lightly. River watches.

‘Actually,’ Simon yells over his shoulder as he departs, ‘my name is Tan Jiaming.’

Hena’s laughter falls like a spring rain.

They leave at Persephone, where it all started, the two of them – brother and sister – and Kay Lee, too. The three of them, children of heaven, children of the Qin Emperor and the Red Book and a scattered diaspora and five thousand years of history, flying headfirst into the future with all the past behind and inside of them, far away from the spaceship where the 汉字 are painted all backwards and wrong.


	2. Afterword

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 《春雨》 has been the little story that could. I’m writing this because I want to give voice to the context from which I was working when I created 《春雨》。

[《春雨》 has been the little story that could.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/98108)

When Racebending Revenge first went live, I had another story which I fussed over – _orbiting a yellow sun_. I actually sat down, plotted that, and had it beta’d. Quite possibly I overthought it, although I have always loved the team dynamics of _Power Rangers: In Space_, one of my first fandoms from childhood. Yet that story largely slipped by unnoticed, and all the attention – an overwhelming deluge of love, really – was directed on 《春雨》, which I hurriedly tapped out in forty-five minutes on a sweltering July afternoon when the plotbunny seized me.

However, despite the interest that 《春雨》 has drawn – including aca-fannish interest; and I am not opposed to that, seeing as I have interests and research work that could well be classed as aca-fannish in itself – I am uncomfortable with the framing of some of the responses to the story. I am aware, of course, that authorial intent counts for little. As a postcolonial feminist, I cannot but believe in reader-intent interpretation. But neither creative work nor analysis exist without context, and I’m writing this because I want to give voice to the context from which I was working when I created 《春雨》。

I am Chinese. I can barely speak and write Mandarin, I can barely speak Hokkien, and I can only understand a smattering of Teochew and Cantonese. I am Hokkien and Teochew by heritage, with traces of Peranakan in my culture. I am Southeast Asian. I am Singaporean Chinese. I am _not_ – I want to make this clear – a diasporan in terms of identification. My sourceland is Singapore. I am from Southeast Asia. I do not have any natal affection for Fukien or Swatow; my family has lived on this Singaporean land for five generations. I am Chinese, and proud of it, and aware of the attendant privilege and oppression. I am Chinese.

So my relationship with Chinese culture, with Chinese languages, must be negotiated through the lens of my identity as a member of the 华裔 globally. For reasons of racial politics, my own country would have me believe I have roots that go back five thousand years in China – it is meant to assuage the insecurity that I ought to feel as an unlikely ethnic majority in colonised soil. (Just over the causeway, Chinese people who have lived in Malaysia as long as my family has in Singapore are called immigrants – an act arising from different political motivations, but part of the same story of the race-based enclaves which colonialism bequeathed to our nations.) For reasons of politics, 中国 thinks of me as a lost daughter, part of its own glorious history, yet somehow – and I cannot stress this enough, stress the insecurity that this phrase evokes – ‘inauthentically Chinese’. To be Singaporean Chinese is to be part of a small world and a larger world, while feeling as lost as a little cygnet trying to be a duck.

And I am Anglophone. My first language is English. Anywhere outside of Asia, English might be termed my ‘mother tongue’. But here, because of the way racial politics are encoded into the education system, my mother tongue is classified as Mandarin. My immediate family does not speak Mandarin at home. One set of grandparents does, but even so, their native tongue was Hokkien until the government standardised Mandarin to tap into the PRChinese economy some thirty years ago.

In short: 《春雨》 is not perfect. Its understanding of Chinese culture is not perfect. I had one sentence grammar-picked by a native Cantonese user in the comments (a correction for which I am much grateful). Its understanding of what it means to be Chinese, or what Chineseness entails, must be mediated through the second-hand first-hand existence of a teenaged Chinese girl who is either self-evidently and obtrusively Chinese or else insufficiently so. Other Southeast Asian Chinese readers will, at this stage, be nodding at this. Very possibly mainland Chinese, or Hong Kong or Macau Chinese, or Taiwan Chinese, will understand some of this; and Chinese from outside of Asia also. This is not easy to comprehend at first going. Indeed, part of lived experience is that it can never be put down adequately into words, or understood by outsiders.

But if you _are_ going to respond to my work, whether to analyse it, or to praise it, or to criticise it, then you _need_ to know what my context is, or you erase me, and you erase the rest of my words, and my act of writing is futile because all that will be left is a [single story](http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.html).


End file.
